"The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov" by Paul Russell (Cleis Press, Nov. 8).
In real life, Vladimir Nabokov had a younger brother, Sergey, who was gay, a fact that distressed and embarrassed the older sibling. Like his brother, Sergey grew up in the privilege and wealth of imperial Russia; unlike Vladimir, he was always a bit of an outsider, "nearsighted, clumsy and cursed with a stutter that only grew worse" as he aged. But Sergey lived an extraordinary, if sadly brief, life: He had a romance with Jean Cocteau, became a devotee of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and was sent to a Nazi labor camp during World War II, where he died. This fictional memoir is a tender account of a troubled soul trying to slip out from under the shadow of his big brother.
"Love and Shame and Love" by Peter Orner (Little, Brown, Nov. 7).
Three generations of a Chicago family are at the heart of this quirky novel. Moving back and forth between the stories of the main character, Alexander Popper, and those of his parents and grandparents, Mr. Orner turns the lives of ordinary middle-class people into comedy and tragedy. The Poppers have a special interest in politics (Mayor Daley is the family's "benevolent deity"), and the novel opens with Alexander talking to a federal judge, who, "if he was crooked, he wasn't that crooked, which in Chicago, as everywhere, if everywhere was as honest about being dishonest, means something." "Love and Shame and Love" is illustrated by Mr. Orner's brother, Eric, a comic artist. While the staccato pace of Mr. Orner's writing may not be to everyone's taste, it's hard to resist a writer who uses words like "unwardoffable."
"Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life" by Ann Beattie (Scribner, Nov. 15).
She was sometimes called "Plastic Pat," because she smiled serenely through her family's worst crises, but surely beneath Pat Nixon's implacable surface was a sea of longing or loneliness or anger. Ms. Beattie, a novelist and short-story writer, has fused some biographical and historical fact with her keen intuition to create a sketch of a woman whom no one, even her husband, seemed to have understood. "The book isn't just about her, of course," Ms. Beattie said in an interview. "It's about the issue of whether an individual can be known. Whether, and how, we know anyone."
— Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at email@example.com.